Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

Visual storytelling using photos and video has proven to be the most successful approach to social media marketing.

The images that resonate with an audience and that get shared are images that have an emotive element, images that tell a story.

The image the Obama campaign posted after the President was declared the winner is an excellent example of visual storytelling. It is the most retweeted tweet of all time, receiving over 640,000 retweets. All it took was three words, “Four more years,” and a candid photo. It was a hit is because it was the conclusion of a meta narrative: the whole world was following this story, familiar with it’s plot and characters and this photo was the third act....

First it started with Twitter. Now other micro-sharing platforms, like Vine and Snapchat, are becoming a popular way to share content and communicate with friends, family, and online. Vine was acquired by Twitter and officially launched in 2013. It allows users to create looping six-second videos and share them via app only, much like Instagram (in fact, there's not even a user login on Vine's website).

As for Snapchat, it strives to make messaging and communication to friends and family easily through photos with captions that are deleted instantly once the recipient views it (however, the "instant deletion" part is under contention, especially because the iPhone can take screenshots). At the end of 2012, Snapchat users were sending 50 million photos a day.

In response to the large ballooning growth of Snapchat, Facebook created a Poke app that does much of the same thing, in just 12 days. These micro-sharing platforms make sharing photos and video faster than ever, but the question remains, can businesses use it? Here's how....

The iOS legion has been able to play around with Cinemagram since February of last year, but now it's finally time for Android users to also experience what the app's all about. And while there are certainly other animated applications on the platform that are somewhat similar, Cinemagram stands out from the majority due to its built-in social features -- think of it as an Instagram of sorts, where other users can easily comment on and keep up with your recent four-second creations.

What's more, the app allows other tidbits like special effects to be added to videos, while the ability to share these "GIFs on steroids" to Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr are also options within Cinemagram....